Hackers get all romantic

Using a variant of the malicious code that was behind the recent European Storm Worm, hackers have now turned to romance in a bid to trick people.

In a timely attempt to cash in on the upcoming Valentine's Day celebration, victims receive e-mails with various romantic subject lines including ‘you're so far away', ‘I dream of you', ‘old together' and ‘I woof you', the company said.

Attached to the e-mails are files called flash postcard.exe or greetingcard.exe, which contain the worn.

"This attack is taking place against internet users right now around the world. Hackers are trying to break into innocent users' PCs to turn them into a proxy for the relaying of spam," Graham Cluley, senior consultant at Sophos said.

Cluley said the best defence was common sense, combined with up-to-date anti-virus software.